Abstract

Electrostatic interactions play an important role in nanofluidic channels when the channel size is comparable to the Debye screening length. Electrostatic fields have been used to control concentration and transport of ions in nanofluidictransistors. Here, we report a transistor-reservoir-transistor circuit that can be used to turn “on” or “off” protein transport using electrostatic fields with gate voltages of . Our results suggest that global electrostatic interactions of the protein were dominant over other interactions in the nanofluidictransistor. The fabrication technique also demonstrates the feasibility of nanofluidic integrated circuits for the manipulation of biomolecules in picoliter volumes.

Received 29 September 2005Accepted 31 January 2006Published online 24 March 2006

Acknowledgments:

The authors thank Peidong Yang and Rong Fan (University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) as well as Henry Lin, Ram Datar, and Richard Cote (USC) for their continued collaboration in nanofluidics research. This work was supported in part by the following: Basic Energy Sciences, Department of Energy; the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technology Program of the National Cancer Institute; and the National Science Foundation.